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Last weekend’s unconference at Microsoft in Vienna was the biggest Austrian Barcamp so far – the social media scene is growing, interest in social media platforms, new technologies and the paradigm shift in marketing has increased immensely over the last couple of months. This is not a big surprise: more and more people understand that the web 2.0 is not about a new generation of buzzwords that pollute the same old powerpoint presentations, but about a fundamental paradigm shift in the way companies communicate with their customers:

Of course WordPress will continue to “support” the JPEG format; after all, image rendering is the browser’s job, the CMS is not involved when it comes to the actual rendering of images. This is my first April fool on my English blog. :saint: I’ve been doing this for a while on my German blog datenschmutz. Have you spotted any april fool postings on your favorite blogs? Please leave a comment, I’m curious!

Last Week Matt Mullenweg announced on his blog, that the upcoming WordPress 3.0 version drop the support for the JPEG file format. Increasing license costs and Microsoft’s announcement to include SVG support in Internet Explorer 9 were the main reasons for this decision:

With the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 there is no more need for jpg – Microsoft finally embraces the SVG standard, thus helping to make the web a much more open place. JPEG does have some advantages, but they are simply out-weighed by the license costs.

Stephen Elop is the president of Microsoft’s Business Division – naturally, he’s more interested in business innovation than in shiny customer gadgets. In this 6 minute interview, Elop talks about the deep-rooted change companies currently face as the underlying question “how do we deal with this vast amount of information in an efficient way?” is an ongoin project:

This Saturday I’m flying to Las Vegas to attend Mix conference. Microsoft Austria invited me (all these years of iResistance are finally paying off!) to visit the world’s capital of gambling – of course I’ll report my trip on this very blog and via Twitter. After my return from the US you and me hopefully know anything there is to know about one-armed bandits, striptease clubs with high moral standards, new Microsoft web publishing techniques and the status quo of the cloud.

Plus I expect to do a couple of video interviews – I’m not sure why Microsoft called this place “The Commons”, but there is definitely a hang-out and socializing place, which I will take full advantage of since some sessions are quite code-related. Read more →

This weekly round-up comes with a built-in 24 hours of delay, as the author was extremely busy during the last weekend launching the Austrian Internet Council [site in German]. This was an amazing proof of the power of social media: within the short time span of 5 days we our project was the cover story on ORF FutureZone, Austria’s biggest Tech News site. Crowdsourcing is great, but it can be quite time-consuming, especially when there’s a lot of interest and involvement. So, without any further ado, let’s jump right into this week’s hot social media topics!

Ignore everybody!

The first rule of business, is never sell something you love. Otherwise you may as well be selling your children.

The Real Pip-Boy Deal

The Pip Boy saved me various time – while I was strolling through the post-nuclear wastelands of Fallout 3. But the nifty little arm-computer might soon enter real life: Engadget shows pictures of an impressive flexible OLED-Display:

The 4-inch organic electroluminescent display sports up to 1.67 million colors, QVGA (320 x 240) 100ppi resolution, and can be bent to a curvature radius of about 2 inches. Hopefully, this doesn’t become a must-have fashion accessory any time soon: while it’s perfectly appropriate attire for post-apocalyptic wastelands, we don’t know how well it’ll fly at the sorts of high society social events we normally frequent.

Seesmic Desktop: no Air required

TechCrunch interviewed Seismic founder Loic LeMeur – and the most charming Leena Rao managed to make the man talk:

According to Le Meur, Seesmic will soon be offering a browser based client. This offering is actually appealing, considering that Adobe’s AIR platform has some strange UI bugs and quirks and tends to use a good amount of resources on computers. And Seesmic will also launch an iPhone app, which is currently under wraps along with the web-based product.

Jeremy’s own Affiliate-Network

Jeremy Shoemaker has been writing about affiliate marketing for quite some time; but recently he launched his own affiliate-network and published a post about his experiences. I’m really curious about his plans:

Sure I hear you… your thinking “Why the hell would you pay people to sign up for a free course?” It’s a great question and I think when the dust settles around the shoemoneyx.com program I will write all about it, why I did what, and what exact effect it had. I do have a method to my madness but it’s not as many have guessed. We will see if it works but that is for another post

Twitter is becoming infrastructure

Regular Geek posted an interview view on twitter – his main point: Twitter is shifting from an online service to a basic infrastructure upon which early adopters are constructing an eco-system:

So, why is marketing and economy so important to Twitter becoming infrastructure? Without an economy building on top of Twitter data and functionality, Twitter would just be a toy. With people researching the data that is generated from Twitter, it becomes much more important. In order to monetize the system, they can sell the data, but monetization becomes much easier when you become ubiquitous.

Can’t argue with that – with all the various mash-ups and the growing interest in real-time search, it seems that Twitter is here to stay. At least for now.

Bing beats Yahoo

Microsoft’s new search engine hat a great start: TechCrunch reports that Bing overtook Yahoo – now the question is: will this trend last or will the wearer of the ancient headband #2 leap for a comeback?

The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

Content ain’t king

“The idea that ‘content is king’ in blogging is total bullshit” says Viral Garden:

Every day I read hundreds of blog posts. And every day, I see dozens of truly GREAT posts that get no comments. Every day I see dozens of pretty good posts that get dozens of comments and have vibrant conversations.
The difference? Most of the bloggers that write those pretty good posts are also pretty good about leaving their blog and interacting with people on OTHER sites. They comment on their reader’s blogs. They tweet their links on Twitter. They are ACTIVELY social with social media.

Interesting thesis… I’d say that both factors come into play. Social media spamming will just piss people off unless you got some stories that are actually worth watching your moves.

Pic of the week

I admit: I just couldn’t decide between these two beautiful shots. A direct path was taken by eyesplash Mikul, it’s a free-handed shot. The seconded picture portrays a female lying wolf in the zoo of Zürich and was taken by Tambako the Jaguar:

Video of the week

Boats are only people – pretty unreliable ones, to be exact. These love boat passenger are in for a wet treat – feel the pain of these great sailors:

This is the end – of this week’s round-up. Thanks for stopping by and offering me some of your Whuffies. Let’s do it like this: I’ll keep posting and you’ll keep coming back and drop a dime from time to time

Got any news you’d like to read about in my weekly round-up of current blogosphere events?Don’t hesitate to contact me! Of course I’ll include a backlink to your original story.

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This one ain’t exactly cheap, but it will definitely impress any visitor, from casual mobile-user to alpha-geek: Microsoft built the “Surface” Hardware, an innovative touchscreen (which actually isn’t a touchscreen but uses five cameras to track visual input) that allows for a unique user interface experience. But hardware is pretty boring with proper applications, and that’s what this video is all about:

Looking for a cure to stop those social media data loss nightmares? SocialSafe might come in handy: the Adobe Air program grabs your photos, friends list and wall and it even keeps track of all the changes in your contact list.